Rod Emmerson’s view
Underfunding for playcentres grossly unfair
Over the years I have seen it get harder for parents to choose a playcentre. While some of the difficulty is the need for both parents to be in fulltime work I believe most comes from a lack of Government funding and increased Government requirements.
A 3- year- old child attending playcentre for 20 hours a week is entitled to between $ 99.20 and $ 110.40 from the Ministry of Education. At a kindergarten the funding is $ 160.60-$ 238.60.
Playcentres have to meet the same standards as all other early childhood education centres, kindergartens and day care. It is not fair to base the funding children planning for our country’s future. Perhaps Mr Hipkins should go back to school? I nodded in agreement with everything John Darkin said in his aptly titled column “Inept airport needs a LAXative” till the penultimate paragraph, “It’s surely not beyond the wit of the greatest country on earth to provide a transit lounge instead of subjecting passengers to two hours of officious persecution.”
Sorry but it’s been a long time since anyone could say with a straight face the US is the greatest country on earth. The current White House occupant is still promising to “make America great again” as he drags the US down by every international standard of decency, sanity and democracy, though it’s certainly rising rapidly through the ranks of presidentially inspired official persecution of all within its reach. My sympathy to John Darwin on his LAX experience which mirrored mine six months ago. Extremely frustrating. When I was at Air New Zealand in the 1990s I once went to Washington to argue the case for the thousands of passengers passing through the airport on our planes. At that point, Air NZ was the single biggest foreign carrier in Los Angeles.
During a fruitless exchange of robust views, a very senior Immigration executive said, “Tony, I’m sorry, but we simply don’t do transit.” And they still don’t. The locked and receive mainly on the cost of paying staff and teachers.
Parents undertake training, assess and plan for children’s learning, make decisions about running the playcentre, and meet all the requirements for a licence.
It is time the Government recognised the contribution playcentre parents make. guarded room at Terminal 2 has been replaced by the fiasco John experienced. The culprits behind the rash of tobacco robberies are the unholy alliance of money hungry politicians and the health police zealots. The Government has put themselves in the role of drug lords who rake in huge amounts of money while the dairy owners are put in the role of street dealers who take all the risk for very little profit. It’s time for the Government to have the guts to either make tobacco illegal or reduce the tax to make robberies less attractive. Some people may not have noted that Cambridge hosted the cycling and rowing events. The Games happened to coincide with our annual Cambridge Autumn Festival and the town was heaving with people, both residents and visitors, all having a fun time in glorious autumn weather. Congratulations to Brian Rudman for his very succinct column on demands the cruise companies are making to the people of Auckland. Congratulations to Mayor Goff also for not listening to them. What about other idyllic ports like Tahiti, Noumea, Apia? Are the same demands being made of them? If their ships are too big to berth here we don’t want them.
A quick word
Media on edge pending Buckingham Palace announcement. Prince Philip to retire from public duties. Ho hum what an anticlimax. What a magnificent publicity stunt that was. Dominate every news feed and media outlet for a day. But I never want to hear the Royals complain about paparazzi again. Prisoners have the right and responsibility to be rehabilitated. They do not have the right to create more children in New Zealand who have absent fathers. Why are we even entertaining the possibility of a violent convict reproducing while serving a prison sentence? Turn the tables, identify those with criminal DNA and give them vasectomies. Mayor Goff sees only imposts, such as “bed tax”, as the solution to the council's woes while the wage bill heads towards one billion bucks a year. Significant cuts in costs are required. Pat Taylor should get the facts right. I said New Zealand was used as a bolthole back door to Australia by many immigrants. I said the two Herald reporters writing on immigration should disclose their personal interest. And the Pike River families have been Winston Peters, Parliament. Australia can do what it likes just as NZ can. If we don't like the way Australia treats New Zealanders, we can always change our stance. I trust the dairy owners were impressed with the police turnout for the botched bank robbery. It would need that many police to apprehend this dangerous villain, as opposed to a gang of thugs robbing a dairy owner in his shop. Could it be that decades of immigrants using New Zealand as a stepping stone to Australia accounts for the latest clampdown on Kiwis? We should levy an extra tax on the profits of Australian companies to establish a fund to which Kiwis in Australia could apply to have benefits paid up to the level of an Australian citizen. Transit in LA is strictly for the birds. There are at least four other ways I can think of to get to London. The bachelor’s double date and subsequent dumping of Bel wasn't “cruel”, as she so delicately put it, it was downright spiteful.